24 November 2006

Hal's Friday Evening Blog Review #8 - Greeting Card Verses

The quality of the blog I've chosen to review takes a distinct dip this week, which I'm sorry about, but I haven't been feeling too well today and I needed something very undemanding to look it.

Anyway, Greeting Card Verses reads like the kind of poems you used to get in gatefold sleeves of 70s rock bands - particularly jazz-rock fusion bands, who I guess were more susceptible to this kind of thing. Check out the inner sleeves of Return to Forever's Romantic Warrior or Where Have I Known You Before, Santana's Caravanserai or the Mahavishnu Orchestra's Between Nothingness and Eternity for good examples of this (I dunno if the CD sleeves all have the accompanying poems on them though, as my copies of the above are the original 70s releases, on this strange black shiny stuff they used to encode music on in the 20th century... I think it's called "Vine Ale", kind of a cross between beer and wine. Or something.)

Anyhow, if putting this kind of whacked out, hippy-dippy musings on record sleeves starts to come back into fashion then "Lanx" (the blogger) might be in luck. I don't think that's very likely, (1) because the cheesy-listening side of 70s rock - Supertramp, Leo Sayer etc. - is much more in fashion these days than jazz-rock; (2) the way downloads are taking over, there aren't going to be any record sleeves in a few years. But that's still Lanx's best shot, as I can't see lines like:


Time is not fluid because it is an applied concept.
We should move outside the calendar measures
Embrace that which the mind would measure…


making it into your local branch of Clinton's or Paperchase any time soon. I could go on for a very long time about the different poems here, but you'd probably kick your screen in, so I'll leave you with this excerpt from the post on 19th November which seems to be about Tony Blair...

You have become unto a wraith
Shadowing your former great self
Outside of the penumbra of joy
Yet we sit still in its enigmatic light
Knowing the only true path is love


David Cameron should use that at the next Prime Minister's Questions!

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